Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia between the Wars (review)

Early in her introduction to this comprehensive volume of essays, editor Susan Gross Solomon offers a summation of the book's richly realized purpose of exploring one important but largely ignored aspect of the history of the interwar Russian and German "pariah states": "we need to look below the level of the nation-state, at the intellectual agendas, disciplinary contacts, and institutional settings of . . . scientists involved in . . . cross-national relations" (11). These contacts were "not grassroots ventures" (7) and reflected various top-down concerns: the German idea of a special relationship with Russia (which arose either from need or shared destiny), the Soviet pursuit of "both leftists and nationalists in Germany" (103), and German anticipations of "strategic relevance" (49 ). The authors in Doing Medicine Together, however, are concerned—as the volume's participial title indicates—with doings below the level of bilateral government arrangements in four areas: the choice of scientific friends; scientific entrepreneurship under the theoretical rubrics of loose concepts, boundary objects, and trading zones; the complex intersections of nationalism, bilateralism, and internationalism; and scientific migration to "the Other."

This last area treats German émigré-physicians and medical researchers moving to Russia from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Solomon protests too much that this subject falls outside the book's subject matter of the "normal . . . voluntary . . . 'circulation of elites'" (20), because the two essays (of eleven) devoted to this subject in truth provide a sad conclusion to the volume in line with the more than sad end to the interwar period itself, as particularly and appropriately evident in Nikolai Krementsov's essay, "Eugenics, Rassenhygiene, and Human Genetics in the Late 1930 s: The Case of the Seventh International Genetics Congress." The subject of emigration itself maintains the overall orientation of the essays as a whole, which for the most part concern the movement of Germans into and within Russia. The only, and partial, exception to this is Jochen Richter's "Castor and Pollux in Brain Research: The Berlin and the Moscow Brain Research Institutes," which describes the visits and stays of Russian scientists in Berlin, although it does include a discussion of the German physicians who treated Lenin (and his brain) in 1922. Such an emphasis may also be detected in the inaccuracy of the use of the plural in the title of second section of the volume, "Scientific Entrepreneurs across Borders." All four of the essays in this part of the book in fact concern just a single individual, German hygienist Heinz Zeiss, and his extensive travels and contacts in the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1932. This is not to say that the book distorts history. Indeed, more of the scientific action described in Doing Medicine Together occurred in the Soviet Union than in Germany, although there is plenty to say about Russian scientists in—and their effect on—Germany. But as with the appropriate reference in one of the essays on Zeiss to a recent "veritable explosion of travel literature" (199), much of the volume is taken up with accounts of Germans exploiting their Rapallo relationship with the Soviet Union to explore an exotic yet also professionally familiar land to the east.

There are few substantial criticisms to be made of Doing Medicine Together. Editorial ambivalence about engaging the 1930s due to Nazi interruption of scientific cooperation prevents an even fuller treatment, for one, of peripatetic case study Zeiss, who would continue his work for the Nazi regime as, among other things, "surgeon general of Hitler's armies in the East" (229) and, together with Karl Pintschovious of the Reich War Ministry, would (as Heinrich Zeiss) edit Zivilisationsschäden am Menschen (Berlin: J. F. Lehmann, 1940, 1944). Zeiss's career in the Third Reich reminds us that Russia remained an object of German interest and study after 1933, only now in the explicit racist context merely anticipated in earlier "revanchist imperialist" (36) scientific flirtations with Ostraum and Lebensraum. In terms of the book...